Wehrey to talk about Owens Valley history

Historian and author Jane Wehrey will speak about her latest book, “Images of America: The Owens Valley” at the Tuesday, November 19 meeting of the Historical Society of the Upper Mojave Desert. The meeting begins at 7 p.m. at the Historic USO Building, 230 W. Ridgecrest Blvd.

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Ridgecrest Daily Independent - Ridgecrest, CA

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Posted Nov. 16, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Posted Nov. 16, 2013 at 12:01 AM

Historian and author Jane Wehrey will speak about her latest book, “Images of America: The Owens Valley” at the Tuesday, November 19 meeting of the Historical Society of the Upper Mojave Desert. The meeting begins at 7 p.m. at the Historic USO Building, 230 W. Ridgecrest Blvd.

Using “Images” with its wealth of rich and diverse photographs, Wehrey will explore the many meanings of the bold and beautiful land that John Muir once called “a country of wonderful contrasts.” Inhabiting its complex and tumultuous past are the native people, miners and farmers, speculators and city-builders whose values, aspirations and labor have shaped the Owens Valley as we know it today.

The interplay of landscape and human activity figures prominently in Wehrey’s imagining of the Owens Valley and of the three books she has written about it. Wehrey demonstrates that the valley’s early communities developed along patterns found throughout the American West, as struggling frontier outposts often evolved into today’s settled towns, while lively mining boomtowns could fail and simply disappear. By the early 20th century, the Owens Valley’s fortunes and livelihoods had become inextricably entwined with a far larger historical backdrop: the growth of distant cities and their search for water in the arid West. The inception and building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the “water wars” that followed are indisputably the valley’s best-known history but no less dramatic was the grassroots effort to lift the region from economic and social despair into a new era.

Wehrey spent much of her youth in the Owens Valley. As a research associate at the CSUF Center for Oral and Public History, she led research and oral history projects under contract for the National Park Service as it developed the former Manzanar War Relocation Center as a national historic site, and she was an advisor on the documentary film shown in the Visitor Center. She is also the author of “Voices from this Long Brown Land: Oral Recollections of Owens Valley Lives and Manzanar Pasts” and “Manzanar.”

HSUMD meets on the third Tuesday of most months. Meetings are free, and all are welcome to attend. For more information on this and future meetings, call (760) 375-8456.